Certain existing optical devices employ laser systems to illuminate targets that are then observed with a receiver sensor. Frequently, these receivers are located in the same device and transportation platform (e.g. an airplane, truck, or other vehicle) in which the transmitting laser is located.
For very demanding applications, the receiver sensors may employ very sensitive detectors that are often highly susceptible to disruption by stray light. This stray light, when it illuminates the detector in the receiver, may render the detector useless for its intended application due to at least one of two distinct phenomena. The first phenomenon occurs when the scattered light signal is sufficiently large, causing it to be the dominant signal present on the detector, making detection of the desired signal impossible. The second phenomenon occurs when the detector's sensitivity is very great, and, if the electronic mode of detection is of certain types (e.g. detectors that employ avalanche photo-detection), this stray light, when it illuminates the detector, has the potential to irreversibly damage the detector, rendering it permanently useless.
For various reasons, which are due, in part, to the limitations of optical fabrication technology, there exists a certain amount of scattered light reflections from all of the optical services present in the optical pathway of the transmitting laser source. These surfaces may be mirrors, lenses, filters, etc. Therefore, it is an inherent problem of all laser detection systems that stray light from the laser source may damage an optical detector, or may render the device entirely, or partially useless.
While light traps and isolators exist, no such devices exist that provide sufficient protection of today's sensitive receivers from the laser transmitters used in modern relatively high-power applications.
What is needed, therefore, is a device that can trap and isolate large amounts of laser power so that it cannot eventually travel to a detector in an optical receiver.